Page:The complete poetical works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, including materials never before printed in any edition of the poems.djvu/406

376 Or a swift eagle in the morning glare Breasting the whirlwind with impetuous flight, The pinnace, oared by those enchanted wings, Clove the fierce streams towards their upper springs.

The water flashed, like sunlight by the prow Of a noon-wandering meteor flung to Heaven; The still air seemed as if its waves did flow In tempest down the mountains; loosely driven The lady's radiant hair streamed to and fro: Beneath, the billows having vainly striven Indignant and impetuous, roared to feel The swift and steady motion of the keel.

Or when the weary moon was in the wane, Or in the noon of interlunar night, The lady-witch in visions could not chain Her spirit; but sailed forth under the light Of shooting stars, and bade extend amain Its storm-outspeeding wings, the Hermaphrodite; She to the Austral waters took her way, Beyond the fabulous Thamondocana ,— Where, like a meadow which no scythe has shaven, Which rain could never bend, or whirl-blast shake, With the Antarctic constellations paven, Canopus and his crew, lay the Austral lake— There she would build herself a windless haven Out of the clouds whose moving turrets make The bastions of the storm, when through the sky The spirits of the tempest thundered by: A haven beneath whose translucent floor The tremulous stars sparkled unfathomably, And around which the solid vapours hoar, Based on the level waters, to the sky Lifted their dreadful crags, and like a shore Of wintry mountains, inaccessibly Hemmed in with rifts and precipices gray, And hanging crags, many a cove and bay.

And whilst the outer lake beneath the lash Of the wind's scourge, foamed like a wounded thing, And the incessant hail with stony clash Ploughed up the waters, and the flagging wing